Books.

It is really an appalling thing to think of the people who have no books. Can we picture to ourselves a home without these gentle friends? Can we imagine a life dead to all the gracious influences of sweet thoughts sweetly spoken, of tender suggestions tenderly whispered, of holy dreams, glowing plays of fancy, unexpected re-minding of subtle analogies and unsuspected harmonies, and those swift thoughts which pierce the heart like an arrow, and fill us with a new sense of what we are and what we may be? Yet there are thousands and tens of thousands of homes where these influences never reach, where the whole of the world is hard, cruel fact unredeemed by hope or illusion, with the beauty of the world shut out and the grace of life destroyed. It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We page 12 may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two bunches—those who read books and those who do not. Digger Indians, Somaulis, Veddahs, Andaman, Islanders, Lancashire wife-kickers, Irish landlord shooters, belong to those who do not. How few, alas! be those who do! I lately saw in some paper, and was not surprised to see it, that the result of a complete Board-school course is generally that the boys and girls who have been triumphant in special subjects for the sake of the grant go away without the least idea ever to read anything else for the rest of their lives. This seems a disappointing outcome of any system of education. With infinite pains and at great expense we put into a boy's hands the key to all the knowledge whereunto man has attained, to all the knowledge whereunto he may hereafter attain, and to most of the delights of life—and he does not care to exercise that power. Perhaps it is not altogether the fault of the system. In every school, one knows there is the boy who loves reading, and the boy who does not. He is found as a matter of course in the Board school as much as at Rugby. And many most respectable men, it must be confessed, have got on in the world without any love for books, with no desire at all for knowledge, and with absolutely no feeling for the beauty and force of language. One such I knew in days bygone, an excellent person who had read but one book in all his life: it was Macaulay's Essays. Nor did he ever desire to read another book; it was enough for him. On a certain evening I persuaded him to come with me to a theatre, for the first time in his life. He sat out the performance with great politeness and patience. It did not touch him in the least, though the piece was very funny and very well acted. When we came away, he said to me, "Yes, it was a pleasing exhibition, but I would rather have been reading Macaulay's Essays." Another man I once knew who made one book last through a considerable part of his life, but this was perhaps mere pretence, with craft and subtlety. Thus, for many years, if he was asked for an opinion, he invariably replied, "I have not yet had time to investigate the question. I am at present engaged upon Humboldt's 'Cosmos.'" The taste for reading in fact is born with one. We may even conceive of a man born with that taste, yet never taught to read. He would grow up melancholy, moody, ever conscious that something was absent which would have made an incomplete life harmonious and delightful. Fancy the prehistoric man born with such a taste, uncomfortable because something, he knew not what, was wanting; restless, dissatisfied, yearning after some unknown delight, sorrowful yet unable to explain his sorrow; taking no solid pleasure like his fellows in sucking his marrow-bones, crouching among the bones in the innermost recesses of the cave, regardless of his kitchen midden. Happy, indeed, for that small section of previously unsatisfied mankind, when someone, after intolerable searchings of spirit, and with infinite travail, produced the first rude semblance of hieroglyph, Phoenician, Cuneiform, or Hittite. As for the rest of mankind, they might have gone on to this day, as indeed they practically do, without an alphabet, and would never have missed it. So that, after all, we need not feel too much indignation over the failure, of the School Board.—Froude,